Ten Pushups
by SocialMoth
Summary: One-shot; very pre-movie. It's all fun and games until someone drops their sword. Then it depends on whether you're the one who dropped it.


**March 2013**

**Once upon a time, a friend and I went to see "Hansel and Gretel" cos he missed his girlfriend and I was bored and sometimes you just need a medieval movie with senseless violence and heads sploding left and right to distract you from physics homework. I came home and thereafter had a tendency to write spastic one-offs because sibling feels. And I felt the need to explain this in run-on sentences. Now I'm gonna sit here and watch the English majors twitch.**

**Sort of inspired by the (foam) sword sparring this friend and I do. (I don't remember anymore, did they use swords?) Cos I don't have hand-to-hand skills nor do I quite know how any gun works. And you write archery by drawing the arrow back and releasing it and praying it hits the target if it swoons three feet. But I know sword the way ten-year-old me subsisting on PB&J sandwiches knew cooking. So alonz-y.  
**

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"Ready?" He gazed uncertainly around the tip at her. Furrowing her brow with effort, she lifted the hilt to her hip, and fulcrumed the blade to meet his.

"It's really heavy," she griped, as she did every time.

He pursed his lips briefly. She was still so young. If he could change it all...

"I have the sugar sickness," he muttered back, softly, as he often did. Such vigorous training depleted his reserves faster. He kept doing it, despite the expense, because she needed someone to practice against whom she could _really_ trust.

Because she would trust anyone. And that scared him beyond reason.

Her displeasure with the weight of the sword fell, and she focused on him. Shifted the sword as part of her weight, found her balance. She nodded.

He swung. She blocked. The _clang!_ resounded in the courtyard. They paused a moment, hair standing on end from the cold scrape of rusty metal. Had anyone heard them, this time? No.

With a grunt of exertion, she threw herself behind her sword, bringing it toward his shoulder. He just managed to counter it, sliding the tip of his blade swiftly toward her fingers. With a squeak, she released her grip in panic, and the dull weapon clattered hard into the stone paving. Stopping just short of her hovering palms, Hansel straightened and lowered the point of his sword. Angry with herself, Gretel locked eyes with him. He gestured with the sword to the ground before her. "Ten pushups," he barked.

Glowering, Gretel lowered to her palms and toes and grunted through the set. "You're getting better, though," Hansel commented when she all but collapsed after the tenth rep. "Remember when we started?"

Just a short two weeks ago Gretel couldn't get one good pushup out. She flicked onto her knees and flexed her arm. "I don't have muscles yet," she said, frowning. She gazed up at her brother, two years older and though he wasn't aware of it quite yet, on the eve of puberty. He'd already begun to grow taller, his once-wiry frame becoming broader. As a comparison he felt for his bicep popping against his tunic sleeve.

"You'll get there." For now, Gretel remained the pale waif she'd always been since she was a child. Hansel smiled sympathetically at her. Shaking it off, she staggered to her feet, her boot catching on her skirt as it often did.

"Curse this thing," she grumbled after nearly tripping. If the siblings practiced indoors where they were unlikely to be walked in on, Gretel often forewent the skirt altogether, sparring with Hansel in just her shirt and an old pair of breeches borrowed from him. Those times, she typically stood a better chance against him, but as Hansel told her over and over again, "girls don't wear pants; learn to fight in a dress, or they'll burn you for a witch yourself."

It had happened enough times before that the exchange did not need to happen this time around. Just the mild swear and back to business.

"Ready?" Hansel said again. This time after she nodded, Gretel took a steadying step backward. Her dark eyes focused and Hansel tightened his grip on his sword. He knew that look; she had something she wanted to try. Someone was about to get hurt – he worried more that it might be her. Slowly, she circled him, sword quivering with the effort to keep it leveled at him. Pivoting on the spot, Hansel kept a sharp eye on her; who knew when-

And suddenly her blade flew toward his face, and he just managed to block it. The sound broke against his ear and it was almost painful enough to make him lose his hold. But he kept it, bracing his feet against the dips in the cobbled stone paving. "Good," he noted, lip twitching upward. A small smirk twisted on her face. A dissatisfied smirk; she had wanted her plan to work. She leapt away as well as she could, planting her feet. They circled each other. Gretel puffed a strand of hair out of her vision. It was getting long again. Hadn't he just helped her cut it?

This time he made the first move; for his superior strength he still couldn't move the heavy sword fast enough that she couldn't block it. The blades were stupendously dull; that was the only way he would let one come near his sister. But it still hurt like hell to get smacked with one. The bruises seemed to last for weeks.

Gretel blocked it. And pitched herself forward so fast the tip of her blade jabbed his knuckles before he could move out of the way. "What-!" Hansel couldn't move fast enough and the sword hit the ground and the noise echoed loudly.

The surprise whisked away from Gretel's face and a smug grin fully stretched over her face. Her dark eyes glittered. "Ten pushups."

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**Apparently diabetes runs in Dad's side of the family, but I haven't met anyone who has it. Go figure. But I know from personal experience that muscle/strength builds rather quickly when you force it to; therefore, Gretel.**

**Thanks for reading! :D**


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